March 2023
This is Café Landtmann, the Viennese coffee house which has served up coffee, cake and conversation for 150 years. Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud hung out here back in their day, and I met a colleague there last week. In 2011, UNESCO declared the Landtmann and all of Vienna’s cafés to be cultural treasures, places “where time and space are consumed, but only the coffee is found on the bill.”
The pastries at Café Landtmann are gemlike confections, but they’re not what you’d call nourishing (although there’s one vegan option — yay). But creating a space where ideas can be shared, where dialogue can happen and people can come together nourishes who we are like nothing else. I know what you’re saying — we have Starbucks, we have virtual community, we’ve evolved and we’re fine. But we’re not. I fear our lives move too quickly now to allow us enough time and space to muse alone or sit and talk and exchange ideas with others. We stay in our lanes, our silos, our niches. But in doing so, we miss out on a wider, wilder world. Like, hey, did you know Mahler and Beyoncé are related? I’m saying there are connections we don’t realize when we keep to ourselves or get all our information from a single source.
That said, open dialogue in our divided world is damned hard. But the world was just as crazy in Freud’s day. He was all for drugs, as much of Vienna was, but he realized it wasn’t enough. He founded psychoanalysis, aka talk therapy, on the principle that conversation, talking with another, unlocks answers and ideas in a way drugs can’t.
The world still stinks. But when we allow the time and space to come together, we create the shimmering possibility of creating something better. So let’s talk! At the very least, there’s coffee and cake.
mit liebe unt kohlsprossen (with love and Brussels sprouts),
Ellen
ICYMI, my Friday With Friends interview through Brahma Kumaris is now up and live on YouTube.
Looking ahead,I have two new cooking classes through Miami Dade Public Library coming in April, free, vegan, virtual and just in time for Earth Day. Sign up and stay tuned.
March is Women’s History Month. Honor the fierce femmes in your life.
For more women who wow, meet some of my dazzling colleagues with this lecture series through Les Dames d’Escoffier .
March 8 International Women’s Day and Holi, India’s joyous festival of color, celebrating the start of spring and the triumph of good over evil.
March 12 Daylight Savings Time, the one my CPA husband hates this time of year. Time to spring forward and turn your clocks ahead one hour.
March 17 St. Patrick’s Day
March 21 first official day of spring
March 22 Beginning of Ramadan
March 29 Whole Grains Sampling Day